People are Seeing Dog Faces in Wood and It’s Strangely Amazing

You know you’re obsessed with dogs when you start seeing them everywhere—even staring back at you from the kitchen cabinets.

The scientific term for finding recognizable features inside random things like woodgrain or rocks is called pareidolia. Beyond dog faces, there’s a subreddit or two dedicated to the fascinating phenomenon.

Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

This photo went right to the front page on Reddit, causing users to share their own wood grain dog photos as well as a lot of silly dog puns. Some folks even invented mysterious back stories for the images. For example: perhaps the dogs’ souls were trapped in the wood, or these represented a case of reincarnation gone badly wrong.

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Whatever the cause, you have admit, these dog faces trapped in wood are pretty uncanny.